The Frogs is a comedy written by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes. It was performed at the Lenaia, one of the Festivals of Dionysus in Athens, in 405 BC and received first place.
Red-figure vase painting showing an actor dressed as Xanthias in The Frogs, standing next to a statuette of Heracles
Bust of Aeschylus from the Capitoline Museum
Marble bust from the fourth century BC depicting Alcibiades, who is referenced throughout the play
A 1902 playbill of The Frogs
Aristophanes was an Ancient Greek comic playwright from Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. He wrote in total forty plays, of which eleven survive virtually complete today. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
Bust of Aristophanes (1st century AD)
Theatre of Dionysus, Athens – in Aristophanes' time, the audience probably sat on wooden benches with earth foundations.
Muse reading, Louvre
Thalia, muse of comedy, gazing upon a comic mask (detail from Muses' Sarcophagus)